Ban TikTok? Maybe. Force them to reveal basic data? Definitely

We do not know the top videos on TikTok.

Not for the US. Not for Indonesia, not for Brazil, not for the EU. Not for the world as a whole.

At the same time, the US House of Representatives has passed a bill that would effectively ban the app, unless it’s sold (the bill still needs to pass through the Senate).

There may be a case for banning TikTok. But it’s absurd that this decision, by some of the most powerful politicians in the world, is being made in a total vacuum of basic data about the platform. In particular, the most viewed videos on TikTok — which make up the lion’s share of the information Americans consume via the app.

If, like these politicians, you’re worried about TikTok being used as a vehicle for propaganda, it’s an absolute no-brainer to impose an elementary amount of transparency on ByteDance, to figure out what it’s spoonfeeding your citizens.

Just ask TikTok for a regular list of all videos with a view count of 100,000+, publish it, and let everyone from researchers and journalists to the CIA and NSA go to town.

As The Economist puts it:

A newspaper’s editorial line can be seen in black and white; by contrast, every TikTok user gets a different feed, and the company does not provide adequate tools to examine its output in aggregate.

That’s true. But TikTok’s ‘output in aggregate’ is 80/20 determined by the videos on the platform with the top view counts. The maths virtually dictates this, and although we (for obvious reasons) can’t get actual numbers from TikTok to back this up, a study on YouTube estimates that videos with 10,000+ views accounted for 94% of overall views.

To start to scrutinize TikTok properly, we need data on its top videos — not just in the US, but everywhere. And we need it real-time, so we don’t have to wait for academics to publish papers revealing which videos got watched by billions of people a year ago.

To put it more simply:

Billions of views are missing.

Not just for videos on TikTok, but for videos and other posts on YouTube, Instagram, Snap, X, Pinterest and others.

The good news

The EU’s Digital Services Act (DSA) forces platforms to give researchers access to public data, and I’m working on a campaign to use this law to force TikTok, and others, to reveal their top content.

The US’s Platform Accountability and Transparency Act (PATA), which came back to Congress in June last year, would also force platforms to reveal top content — in fact, even more directly than the DSA:

But it’s not clear when or whether it’ll get passed.

Whether this TikTok ban goes through or not — we urgently need real-time data on top content consumed via TikTok and others.